Posted in food, kyoto on Apr 9th, 2007 No Comments »
List of Kyoto vegetables (A)
Kyo takenoko (bamboo shoot)
A spring vegetable grown in Nishiyama, the Western Hills. The young shoots of bamboo (raised by farmers) are eaten after boiling, but Kyo takenoko is also eaten uncooked, just after being dug up, and dipped in vinegared miso. The taste is sweet, the flesh soft.
Kyo myoga (mioga, […]
Posted in nature, calendar, travel and places, kyoto on Apr 8th, 2007 1 Comment »
The Philosopher’s Path (Tetsugaku no Michi) in Kyoto is one of my favorite walks, but I had been there only in summer, autumn (good for momiji leaves) and winter, as I discovered yesterday, because I never realized that it is also the prime sakura spot in Kyoto!
The philosopher’s Path is a 2 kilometer trail along […]
Posted in books, culture, movies, intercultural on Apr 8th, 2007 No Comments »
Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno: Tokyo Teen Fashion Subculture Handbook looks so much like a beautiful piece of candy that it is difficult to resist the temptation to pick a copy up when coming across it in a bookstore. And “eye candy” it certainly is, with great illustrations by Kazumi Nonaka and graphic design by Izumi […]
Posted in museums on Apr 7th, 2007 No Comments »
The history museum of Hiroshima Prefecture stands in the Castle Park of Fukuyama, and not in the capital, Hiroshima. But Fukuyama was selected for a good reason: it is the site of Kusado Sengen, a medieval port city in the Ashida River delta that flourished in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods and in its heyday […]
Posted in travel and places on Apr 6th, 2007 No Comments »
Skip getting up at a terribly early time to go to the Tsukiji fish market, as everybody is going there already.
Instead, start your adventurous day slowly by having a late coffee in a maid cafe in Akihabara and then (as you have to buy souvenirs anyway and might as well get over with it as […]
Posted in nature, calendar, travel and places, kyoto on Apr 5th, 2007 No Comments »
One of the most famous places for seeing cherryblossoms in Osaka is the Mint, or Zoheikyoku, which features a long lane where rare cherry trees form a veritable tunnel of blossoms.
As the branches hang down low, the flowers are surprisingly closeby.
There are apparently 120 different kinds of cherrytrees and about tree times as many trees; […]
Posted in art and photography, travel and places, temples, kyoto on Apr 5th, 2007 No Comments »
Many times I have been in the East Temple, Toji, to experience its mystic three-dimensional mandalas and enjoy its other wondrous statues. It is a temple of esoteric anger and benevolence at the same time, a temple as old as the city in which it stands. Unfortunately, it lies on the wrong side of the […]
Posted in nature on Apr 4th, 2007 No Comments »
There was a sudden spell of rain today, with cold air, after which the sun came through again. That caused a beautiful rainbow to appear in the sky over Osaka:
Posted in calendar, museums, temples, kyoto on Apr 4th, 2007 No Comments »
It is spring, so many Kyoto temples that are usually closed will open their doors - some only briefly. Here is a selection:
Anrakuji: weekends from April 7 to June 2 as well as the last part of Golden Week (May 3-6). Anrakuji is named after a disciple of Honen, who was executed with his colleague […]
Posted in food, kyoto on Apr 3rd, 2007 No Comments »
Kyo-yasai:
Vegetables cultivated in Kyoto since the Edo period or earlier. Most of these came originally from China or Korea (Japan has very few indigenous vegetables, mainly mioga (a sort of ginger) and seri (dropworth). The rest was introduced from the Asian mainland between the fifth and twelfth centuries and afterwards “domesticated” in Japan. These vegetables […]